


The Clock

by JessaLRynn



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: BAMF Rose Tyler, Dark, F/M, Gen, Panic, Rage, evil government
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 14:40:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12914034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessaLRynn/pseuds/JessaLRynn
Summary: She knows without a doubt he's here and doesn't dare believe it at once,  and he wants to rip this world apart to find everyone else who has done  this to her and make them pay.For himself, as the most guilty party, the Doctor will be paying forever.





	The Clock

It's the shriek, the wordless cry of rage and anguish, that lets the Doctor know where he has to go.  There's one last obstacle, a sealed and barred door, but a large booted foot makes short work of it, and he pulls the rest of it apart with his hands, heedless of the jagged wood.  The pain he hears, the pain he needs to heal, now, that's what's important.

He sees her before she sees him, and he will never forget the way she looks in this moment.  There's golden sunlight streaming down on her through a brand new hole in the ceiling, where the Clock used to be.  She's on fire, made of fire, and wielding a terrible blade with hands too small to hold it.  Her lip is split and bleeding, and the vivid crimson droplets look as if they've been gilded as they lay on her chin.  He can't make out the words she's saying, doesn't even know if they are words, but he can feel the emotion and the force behind them, the fury and sorrow that beat in the echoes of her raging and echo in the beats of his hearts. 

The Clock, that wretched, terrible tool of brutality and humiliation, lies crushed beneath her feet, mangled and broken and already falling to dust.  Still she hacks at it, and tears stream down her face, and the Doctor can't help but wonder how she's even breathing. 

"Rose," he whispers, because his throat has closed up and he can't talk any louder, beckoning and pleading.  Everything stops, as if he's thrown a switch.  There's silence like deep space, cold and lifeless, and then she looks up, her overflowing dark eyes absolutely huge.

"Doctor," she breathes, and her weapon clatters to the floor.  He will never forget this either, the wild hope, the awestruck fear, the desperately hesitant joy.  She reminds him of great and horrible things in this instant, and all the possibilities that have always tumbled and flowed around her spin like a newborn star.  She knows without a doubt he's here and doesn't dare believe it at once, and he wants to rip this world apart to find everyone else who has done this to her and make them pay.

For himself, as the most guilty party, the Doctor will be paying forever.

He holds his arms wide, and she blinks, trembles, breaks.  She hurls herself across the destroyed Clock room, her motion inhumanly fast, even in the Doctor's perception.  It happens too quickly, and seems to take forever, before she's flinging herself into his arms, the entire weight of her small and shaking body hitting him full force, right between the hearts.  She hugs at him and clutches and seems to be trying to burrow inside his leather coat with him.  The Doctor would let her, if he could.  Sometimes, he thinks he'd drag her inside him entirely were it possible.

"My Rose," he whispers into her hair, damned by his own grief.  He can't help remembering the last time he held her, close and tight like this, a mere three days ago.  Only three local days, and he knows now (though he probably always knew), that he may not survive if he has to endure that long without her ever again. 

She sobs, a tearing, jagged sound, ripped from her body as surely as her axe tore the Clock from the mooring.  She only clings tighter, and he only lets her, realizing the tears falling into her hair cannot be her own.  He wants to tell her, needs to tell her, oh so many things, and then she grates out, still furious and clutching at his jumper in tightly balled fists, "They said you were dead."

His blood feels like ice in his veins.

**

"What the hell was all that about?" Rose asks, watching with a furious sort of horror as a middle-aged man is hauled, shouting half-translated obscenities, out of the city square. 

The Doctor is almost vibrating with scarcely suppressed rage, but he's had too much practice at this, so he knows which instincts to rely on and which to ignore.  He takes Rose's hand and leads her away from the scene, absolutely the only thing he can do to remind himself not to tear this place down with his bare hands.  He wants to, so very much.  He has no right.

"Doctor!"  Rose is stubborn and recalcitrant, and she has no intention of letting him get away without an explanation.

"It's a local custom." 

She plants her feet.  A simple explanation isn't going to work, either.  "In a minute," he says.  He's lying.  She lets him get away with it and nods.

However, they don't get much further than the next alley before she's tugging at his hand, dragging him out of the sunlight.  He entertains himself with the thought that an alley with her has such interesting possibilities, but keeps it to himself.  No one needs Rose even half as angry as he feels.

"Now," she says, crowding him and trying to look stern and authoritative.  It's one of her more adorable expressions, and almost makes him feel a little better.

"It's something I hate and can't change," he says, quite reluctantly.  She frowns, and he can hear the silent "why?" in her body language alone.  "S'a fixed event.  It becomes legend, myth, art, and song around here, as well as changing the society for the proper good."

"Whaddya mean 'the proper good'?"

"The Clock," he grates, and has to stop because he still wants to kill something.

"What about it?" she asks.  He can tell she's caught on that he's upset, because she's gotten all soft-voiced and patient.  "The one in these posters that claim it's saved society?"

He scoffs.  "It cuts down on crime by legitimizing it.  Anyone who feels like committing a violent crime can apply at the Clock office."

"And then they jail the applicant?" Rose demands hotly.

"Nope.  S'a random seed system.  Some folks get to commit their crimes, others don't."  He glares out at the alley to avoid having to meet her eyes.

Rose sounds puzzled as she speaks.  "But I thought you said we were here to find some sort of article amplifier... whatsits."

"Amplified event fluctuation.  We are," the Doctor agrees grudgingly. 

"So..."  She looks even more puzzled than she sounds.  "Don't you usually fix things like this?"

He wants to scream, the frustration just below unbearable.  "Nope," he says, because he doesn't.  He doesn't fix things he's not allowed to fix.  He's changed more than one historical event, mucked about, got involved when he probably shouldn't.  But he can't change things that are carved in the face of time, things like Krakatoa, and the Titanic, and this one.

Rose juts her chin rebelliously.  "Well, I'll fix it then," she snaps, and he has to catch her arm to stop her storming off to try just that.

"You can't," he says while she looks at his hand on her elbow like it's attached to a toadstool.  It's an amazingly haughty expression, one he's honestly surprised to see on Rose.  All the same.  "It can't be fiddled with, this event.  There's a whole school of thought, an entire new system of government, an' all kinds of other stuff that's gotta come from this rebellion.  Can't come from us."

She's glaring at his chin now instead of his hand and he just wants to shake her, to make her see that she's hardly the only furious person here.  He's much wiser and older than she, and it still enrages him.  He knows it's wrong, he just can't do anything about it.

"Rose, you have to promise me.  You don't try to start anything.  Don't let somethin' slip in the market, or accidentally get arrested, nothing.  We can't change anything that's gonna happen."

He can honestly feel how upset she is.  Her anger is radiating around her in waves, and anything half as telepathic as he is could see it from space.  She hates seeing people hurt, Rose, and it makes her almost dangerous in her fiercely compassionate way.  He knows how very reluctant she is when she nods.

"Reapers, Rose," he says, by way of emphasis, and immediately regrets it because she's still projecting, and that one statement turns her thoughts to ice and sorrow, and then she shuts it away again, shuts him out.  (Someday, he's going to ask where she learned that, but it isn't today.)

"I said ok," she grumbles.  "S'not my problem, the different ways people find to kill each other."

He nods and moves as she does to stalk out of the alley.  They're halfway down the street, and well into searching for the anomaly he's tracking before he finally calms down enough to mention, "I'll take you to see the stained glass."  He smiles a little, remembering.  "Never understood it all, meself.  It's very symbolic art, you see.  But gorgeous."

She smiles tentatively back at him, and lets him hold her hand again at last.  "I'll hold you to that," she says, and she looks like she's almost able to put it out of her mind, just for a little bit.  They walk into the next street, and the next, following the lead of a beeping box in the Doctor's hand.

They've actually gotten to the point where they're nearly laughing again as he's explaining about the art, and when Rose makes a joke about failing art appreciation worse than hullaballoo, they finally hug to make up, tight and clingy and comfortable together.  This time, they're not interrupted by a key burning between them.  It's so very strange to the Doctor, to feel this right and this safe with another person, and for that person to be a human, well.  He doesn't tell her, just kisses her hair, taking the scent inside him for safekeeping, and leading them on.

The beep becomes more rapid, and they grin at each other, dashing hand-in-hand, deeper into the city, closer to the thickest part of the market at the city center.  They're going to make it, find what they're after, and get the hell out of this horrid place.  The box is beeping like mad, now.

The Clock strikes.

Six heavily armed figures, black-clad with faceless hoods over their heads, appear and surround the Doctor.  He shoves Rose behind him, though it can do little good.  She's scared and angry and wanting to lash out.  She doesn't dare; she doesn't want to end the world, not again.  He hardly dares himself, not sure what the exact history of the near future of this place says. 

"Come with us, in the name of the Clock," one of the executioners intones in a deathly voice.

"The girl goes free," the Doctor answers, because it is not negotiable.

"Fine," the same one says. 

Rose is still shrieking a protest when they haul her in one direction and the Doctor in the other.

**

The bloody lip is the least of Rose's injuries, the Doctor realizes, in the instant before he breaks the hug that just might be hurting her further.  "What did they do to you?" he demands, coldly and quietly, physician's eyes inventorying the extent without needing his permission.

Rose flinches.  "Doesn't matter," she all but whispers, and she won't look up to meet his eyes. 

"Like hell it doesn't!" he snaps, because he's got every right.  How dare she think, even imagine, that all the lives of these barbarian sheep are of any importance to him next to hers?  Somewhere in the past two days, while he'd waited and ached and fought and plotted to hold her again, he'd come to terms with the truth of this situation.  He never wants to come any closer to finding out if he can live without her.

Rose draws away from him, a little, and she still won't look at him, and he just cannot understand.  "Look," she begins urgently, "there's still all those people..."

"They'll figure it out," he insists firmly.  "This, all of this."  He gestures at the Clock, at the Governor's palace burning on the other side of the courtyard, at the metal on metal sounds and the cheering coming from the grounds below them.  "This isn't your problem any more, Rose."

She looks up and meets his eyes at last, and hers are blood shot and teary and developing awful bruises underneath.  She's been beaten, he realizes, and he almost needs to go back to his earlier desire to tear this place down to the ground.  Senseless killing, he opposes that; and the idea that the gun is the first, only solution; and selfishness.  Justice, though, that's always been his sword, even if it's a weapon he wields by the blade.  He's about to offer it to Rose, for her sake, to rebuild this world in her image, if it will make her not hurt and not sad and not looking so lost and lonely.  He can't bring himself to suggest it, just repeats himself, more quietly.  "This isn't your problem."

"Oh," is all she says.  The Doctor thinks she's finally exhausted past caring.

"TARDIS," he commands.

"Yeah," she answers, and then she's sliding, a helpless weight, against him.

**

"I fell in with a group of protesters that same day," Rose relates tonelessly.  "Daf had lost a sister, and Treela a friend, and Sorna had been taken, but not for a murder.  He was beaten horribly and left for dead, and he was so old, Doctor, so fragile.  Then there was Kyla, and I can't stop seeing her eyes.  She was fourteen, an only child, and her parents died.  A family member petitioned to kill her to get her inheritance."

"Kill or be killed," the Doctor murmurs, watching her try to comb out her long hair.  His mind is racing away from telling her what he did to escape, and another part of him is solely focused on wondering if he can take the comb from her and take a turn at the tangles of her hair.  He should have combed it out while she was recovering.  It would have been one less thing to hurt her.  But he'd been unable to think sensibly without her around - it's a little maddening, how necessary she's become to everything about him.  All the same, he won't even try to fight it and he knows it now.

"She killed, all right," Rose says dully.  "She killed her cousin, almost like an accident, in the arena.  Treela was there at the time, and she said something just sort of... broke.  Kyla went mad, just completely, totally insane.  Treela was kinda like her keeper."  She shrugged and switched to a larger comb.  "And there was Yorkan, and it sort of hurt to even look at him.  He was so determined and so earnest and so stupid.  He honestly thought that whole Clock thing was a good idea, just someone hadn't programmed it right or some such. He tried to explain it to me, and I tried to explain to him about choices, and we just didn't get on."

She shrugs again, and puts the comb down, placing her hands firmly on the vanity table and looking up to meet the Doctor's eyes in the mirror.  "They're all dead now, of course."

He shivers from the blankness in her eyes, from how like empty space they look, star-flecked and always so very far away. Rose is always like this when she's coming to terms with things, still and blank until her troubles can fit inside her where ever she intends to keep them.

"I thought Kyla was going to be the girl you talked about," Rose explains, with a sort of self-deprecation that the Doctor's used to feeling, not hearing.  "In a few years, when she'd grown up.  The one from the stained glass?  'A magic creature, half woman, half feral, and all made of gold', you said."  He'd never known Rose paid such careful attention to his words, before. 

Rose's words pick up the pace to a frantic, rapid fire tumble, almost tripping each other to get out.  The Doctor's hearts are squeezing the air out of his lungs, clenching so hard in his chest.  It hurts so much, but he has to listen to her, can't just fold her up in a hug and tell her to forget it all - even if he could make it happen.  He just steels himself and listens - to her and for her.

"And she was, really, and I tried so hard to stay out of it, because you said I had to do, but Sorna had this plan, and they decided we'd need help from anyone we could rescue, and he'd heard you'd all been taken from that area because you were supposed to be victims of a bombing, and there were lots of you, plenty to do everything he needed, and I just had to take a chance to rescue you if I could, and we could make a run for it, or something..."

She stops her breathless tirade just a moment before it turns into a sob.  He can hear it in her careful, forced breathing, as she regains control of her scattered emotions one breath at a time.  "I'm not making excuses," she says, with earnest dignity.  "You told me, and I promised." 

He still can't find the words to comfort her, but his hand closes on her hair comb, and he toys with it idly, almost against his will.  Rose pulls out her makeup kit and starts rifling through it, shaking her head.

"So we break in to the cellar where everyone's s'posed to always wait for the execution decision, at least as far as everyone knew.  Only, turns out, the Governor's waiting for us, with his whole army."  She shakes again, then looks up to meet his eyes again, and the Doctor can see rage in hers.  "It's a trap."

He nods, as he isn't at all surprised.  He'd not known the Governor was involved to this extent, just assumed the Clock scientists had used some elaborate con to gain pseudo-power.  He feels like he risked Rose when he never should have done.

"I honestly don't know what happened, not at first.  They weren't there to kill us, really, or not to kill us kindly, anyway.  They were there to beat us to death.  I know Yorkan died first.  He was so shocked to find out that the Clock wasn't programmed wrong - it wasn't programmed at all, just chimed whenever the Governor wanted it to do.  Soran didn't even stand a chance, of course, and I tried - I promise you, I tried - to make a run for it.  Then, they surrounded Kyla and I figured that could wreck your timeline, so I tried to save her..."

She sighs deeply and lays her head on the counter, ignoring her makeup.  "It was a disaster, Doctor.  Daf and Kyla and I made it through the first assault and started freeing everyone, but the Governor had his guards catch the three of us and drag us upstairs.  Kept calling me 'Otsana', saying I'd been prophesied or some such.  He was nuttier than Kyla, and trust me that's a mouthful."

Her voice fades to a monotone again, tunelessly grinding the fates of these friends of hers against it.  "He had this axe, right, supposed to be ceremonial, and he used it on one of the guards who didn't bow fast enough.  It was apparently one of two ways he liked to get rid of people.  The other was just as bad - he threw them out the tower window.  Daf got both, brained by the axe, then body caught on all those spiky things on the tower.  Kyla got pushed, too, and she just clung to the ledge, giggling.  Then Treela turns up, and he tries to throw her out, too, and she tries to throw him out, and he says if I'll save him, he'll tell me your last words, the last thing you said to him before he hacked your hearts - and he said hearts - out of your chest with that filthy thing."

Terror clenches those hearts, and the Doctor doesn't know how to explain it, and he's not thinking, just closing his hands on Rose's shoulders, wishing she would just turn and never think on this again, almost willing it.  He never wants to take anything from Rose, but this memory, this knowledge, he's almost willing to forget all the niceties and just excise it completely. 

"I don't know how he fell," she grates, her voice strained and tight and thick with unshed tears.  "It was all crowded in there with that axe of his, and he hit me, and Treela slipped, and Kyla had hold of his hand, and she was singing 'Ring Around the Rosie' at him.  It just... he was fighting me for the axe and fighting Kyla for gravity, and the next thing I know, I've got the axe and they're all gone."

She's shaking beneath his fingertips and he knows she's doing everything she knows how to do to keep from crying.  These people deserve Rose Tyler's tears, but something tells the Doctor that Rose thinks she doesn't deserve them herself any more. 

"The rest you know," she whispers.

He nods, even though she can't see him, and then he's threading his fingers, ever so carefully, through the ends of her hair.  He doesn't even know if she can feel his touch.  He should just slip his fingers to her temples and relieve her of this nightmare.  It's all his fault, for being wrong, and too quick to jump to conclusions. 

He only has a split second of body language warning to move his fingers before it happens.  Rose stands up and squares her shoulders.  She looks into the mirror, shaking her head in a sort of dull-eyed disgust.  When she turns to him, she meets his eyes for all of three words before she's looking down at her hands again.  "Is there anything I can't..."  She clears her throat, squeaks, clears it again.  "Is there anything you gave me that I can't take with me?"  She looks up for a second, almost peeking, then back again at her fingers.

Of course she wants to go home.  How stupid could a genius be?  Why would anyone want to stay after a horror like this.  However, denial is more fierce than hurt certainty, and the words are out of his mouth before he's had a chance to even consider them once.  "What're you talking about?!"

Now, she does stare.  Her eyes tilt up to his again, at last, and there's something that looks like a last desperate hope in those dark chocolate depths.  "You're... you're sending..." She chokes again, drops her eyes, takes another gulp of air.  "You're sending me back, aren't you?"

"I'd never!" he exclaims, so desperately worried that she wants to go home that he's completely rubbish at any preservation of his dignity. 

She looks like she doesn't believe him, and like she wants to believe him, and like she's afraid to believe him, all at once.  She looks like she did in the Clock Tower, unsure of everything and needing the world as she prefers it to be the world that’s real.  "But I... I disobeyed you.  Again.  Almost got you killed.  Twice.  I... I broke that world, and I..."  Her voice cracks and the calm breaks open with a torrent.

She sobs and screams and rages, at the world, at the Clock, at the Governor, at the Doctor.  How could he leave her alone on a world like that and how could any life in the Universe lend itself to a civilization like that, and how dare the whole fucking Universe allow something like that to exist in the first place?  After that, she doesn't make a lot of sense, but at one point he knows she says something about reality being better than this, and at another point, when she's at a particularly low point, she says something about how every man she loves leaves her. 

The Doctor wants to be the one who won't leave her, not ever. 

**

She's amazingly resilient, his Rose, getting calmer and stronger in a very few days.  He misses the teasing, laughing Rose, and wants her back, but only if she actually feels that way.  She's made a couple of attempts at pretending, but they fall flat and she seems hurt that she can't just brush it all off.  The Doctor offers to take the memory away, just this once.

She won't part with it, even though the look in her eyes admits she wishes she could make some other choice.  He tells her they're a hell of a pair, choosing to keep memories that make them miserable, and she laughs, an admittedly watery laugh, but the first he's seen of her sense of humor since the day they took him to the Clock.

She doesn't need forgetfulness, and he doesn't need fake Rose.  There is something, though, that she does need, and that's closure, and he knows where he can find it. 

He takes her to see the stained glass, just as he promised before all this horror began.  It takes up entire walls of the memorial that was built where the Clock tower stood before Rose demolished the Clock.  It's considered the most ornate of its kind in the galaxy, fine art with the sort of layering and shading and intricacy that would make Louis Comfort Tiffany turn new and innovative shades of green. 

She's there in the central panel, symbolized as a half-human faerie creature, part woman and part animal avenger.  He never understood it before, how she's depicted as defending a terror from a horror, a shadowy, stormy figure from a hell-spawned monstrosity. 

He knows now that it's Rose, that it's always been her, that in his world, it will always be her.  She protects him in ways he's only beginning to understand, and it's time he makes sure to protect her, too, from what frightens both of them.

"I'd understand if you wanna go home," he says.

"D'you want me to?" she whispers, looking at the stained glass, not at him.  He thinks, though, that he sees a tear on her cheek.

"Part o' me does, yeah," he admits.  "'Cause you got hurt and I never wanted that."

"I didn't want you to get hurt, either!" she says, and he hears a trace of her old bite in her voice.  It makes him almost smile as he turns to her to give her a very serious look.

"I meant what I said before."

"Me, too," she admits, watching the people milling about the memorial.  She smiles, a little, and it's completely real.

"Which bit?" he wonders, confused and relieved at once.

"You first," she says, and he can't help starting to smile himself.

"I'm not gonna just up an' send you home, Rose."  He doesn't want to go into the circumstances where he would, just hopes with both his hearts it never comes to that.

"I do want to go home, though," she says, looking up at him seriously and finally, finally taking his hand.  He's elated and crushed and so confused that all he can do is squeeze her fingers and watch her eyes.  "I've had enough of this place to last a lifetime.  Just - let's go home.  Back to the TARDIS, where we belong."

He'd thought only time would help them, but maybe this is what they've really needed, is this, right here, palm to palm, fingers interlocking.  It's them, and it's comfort and safety and trust. Even if it's all they have in the universe, it's right for them, to understand each other, to promise, to hold on.  This is their world now, the Doctor and Rose Tyler in the TARDIS. 

Every future even he can imagine is possible from there.


End file.
